This invention relates generally to ice scrapers and particularly to hand held ice scrapers for clearing windshields and the like.
Scrapers for removing ice from automobile windshields and windows have recently been developed in convenient and efficient forms. An early widely available form of the scraper was made of a flat integral piece of polymeric material such as polymethacrylate. A pliable polymeric sheath over one end of the piece served as a hand grip. From the hand grip, the piece increased in width to a blade end that had an oblique front surface with a bottom ice scraping edge.
An improved ice scraper was disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,040,140 to E. L. Hopkins et al. It showed a one-piece body with a blade at one end, a tapered handle at the other end, and an intermediate section between the blade and the handle. The intermediate section was curved downwardly so that the blade was disposed below the handle. This enabled the user to exert optimal scraping force in a direction parallel to the surface to be scraped and minimized ice accumulation on the hand of the user.
A scraper with independently flexing fingers was disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,164,801 to R. R. Thomas. The scraper has a blade region comprising resilient, independently flexible, scraping fingers that each have a forward facing chisel edge. Each chisel edge has an ice deflecting surface inclined at an obtuse angle to the surface to be scraped. When the scraper is used, the fingers independently flex so that their scraping edges are independently wedged in the ice to be scraped, and ice fracturing energy is stored in the fingers. The fingers exert force against the ice resulting from energy imparted to the handle by the user and from the stored energy, to fracture the ice, and then resiliently return to their original shape, thereby facilitating displacement of fractured ice away from the scraped surface. The separate flexible finger arrangement of the scraper, besides allowing the storage of energy in the fingers to enhance ice displacement, also gives greater effectiveness to the scraper in cleaning curved surfaces since the independently flexible fingers may conform more readily to such a surface than a solid blade.
It is an object of this invention to provide an improved and novel ice scraper. It is a principal object to provide a scraper with individual flexing fingers that nevertheless can provide a streak-free cleaning swath across an ice or frost covered surface. It is another object to provide a fingered scraper that is resistant to fracturing along the grooves separating the fingers. It is also an object to provide a scraper that has improved ice deflecting or directing characteristics. Other objects are to provide an inexpensive, easily fabricated, effective ice scraper.